Miguel de Cervantes and His Masterpiece: Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes: In 1605, the first part of The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote appeared, a story that immediately attracted the interest of readers of the time. The hero, Alonso Quijano, and his adventures are the result of the intuition and experience of its creator, Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes’s life demonstrates and teaches the human struggle between youth and the reality of their time, which also appears in Don Quixote. Published at the beginning of the 17th century, a decisive period in the history of Spain, it reflects the moment in which the 16th-century Spanish power begins to decline.
Don Quixote, an Anachronistic Hero
1) Plan of the Story
The story begins by telling the life of Alonso Quijano, a poor gentleman who loses his mind because he reads too many books of chivalry. He believes that what is said in them is true, and not what happens in reality. He becomes a knight-errant named Don Quixote of La Mancha and, with the weapons of a knight, sets out to “right wrongs,” accompanied (in the second sally) by a neighbor, Sancho Panza. But knights are no longer in fashion, and their adventures end dramatically, from the taunts of his enemies or society. The work presents some aspects similar to those books of chivalry, so famous in the previous century.
2) Narrative Action
Don Quixote has two parts, published in 1605 and 1615. In the first part, Alonso Quijano leaves home to become a knight-errant and, thanks to his madness, accommodates reality to his imagination, creating chivalric adventures. In the second part, Don Quixote is a known person, and the other characters direct the fantasy of the “gentleman” and prepare meetings and adventures. The action is organized into three sallies, not of the same duration, but its development is at the same time.
3) The Characters
Contrary to what happened in Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes’s characters are individual persons and not types (a group or family). All but Don Quixote and Sancho, the characters are flat, i.e., they have the same attitude throughout the work. Some are real (the housekeeper, the niece), sham (Dulcinea, Merlin), and literary (Roland, Amadis, or Tirant lo Blanc). The two protagonists, Sancho Panza and Alonso Quijano, show a clear evolution in the work: Sancho, a good man, ends up being an idealist, and Alonso Quijano, Don Quixote, stops taking the initiative in the adventures and suffers, in the end, a process of “de-Quixotization.”
4) The Narrative Game
Cervantes tells the story at the expense of narrative deception: he presents the action as if it were a long story, written in Arabic by the learned historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. He had various perspectives on the work: that of the historian, his staff, a narrator, and a translator. This novel was very successful at that time, when the second part was announced. Its influence reaches all subsequent literature; music, with Ravel and Falla, among others; cinema; and painting, with Gustave Doré and Salvador Dalí.
Other Works of Cervantes
Cervantes had a weakness for poetry, but he was unsure if his skills were good enough. He had no success as a playwright but triumphed with dramatic one-acts with humorous and popular topics (Entremeses). His most important creations are in the narrative genre. In his novels, Cervantes transforms the literary preferences of his time. These works represent the development between the fictional world and reality. But in Don Quixote, he unites the two worlds, the real and the imaginary. Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares are twelve short stories, admirable and believable. For example, Rinconete y Cortadillo begins by telling the picaresque adventures of two boys from the time they are in an inn until they reach Seville. They would look similar to those children painted by Murillo a few years later.